SWEET & LOWDOWN (1999)



Woody Allen phones in a lot of half-cooked shit and Sean Penn frequently comes across as a self-important knob, but every few years, both men remind us why it is we liked them in the first place (and put up with them all the rest of the time).  With Sweet & Lowdown, the stars aligned so both Allen and Penn were ascendant simultaneously (effortlessly restoring faith in both after late 20th century missteps like Celebrity and U-Turn, respectively). Penn earned an Oscar nomination for his tall-tale, faux-biopic portrayal of Emmett Ray, a selfish lout redeemed only by his outstanding talent as one of the world’s best guitarists (second only to Django Reinhardt) and an occasional awareness of his own flawed character. The enigma of humanity’s capacity for timeless beauty and mindless cruelty has always fascinated Allen, and here he explores the specific dichotomy of musicians (and, presumably, filmmakers) who are capable of great art, but also truly shitty behavior like, say, running off with a girlfriend’s adopted daughter...or, in Ray’s case, mistreating a sweet, adoring mute girl, played to perfection by Samantha Morton, who also received an Academy nomination for her efforts).

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005)



Brothers of the Head is a ludicrous story, a faux-documentary about a protopunk band fronted by conjoined twins. However, despite the absurdity of the premise (someone is forming a novelty act with conjoined twins and allowed Ken Freakin' Russell on the grounds with a camera?), the movie does its level best to play the story out with a straight, and often tragic, face. The music is not bad and the sexual connotations are almost as clever as the sex in Velvet Goldmine. But the whole seems to be a little less than the sum of its parts. The twin themes seem pulled from Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. The dissolute rock lifestyle seems to be based on the Stones in Gimme Shelter and Cocksucker Blues. In some scenes, the twins appear to be exhausted by the constant filming, aching for some privacy. In other scenes, the documentary premise slides away, unneeded at the moment. Not a bad way to spend 90 minutes, but not the best way, either. Check out the reference materials first.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974)



This wacked-out midnight spectacle, which was released and re-released between 1974 and 1976 without ever finding much of an audience, was written and directed by Brian De Palma, at a transitional period between his early satirical comedies (Greetings, Hi Mom!) and the horror movies that would make him bankable. The plot, which scavenges a shelfload of classic scare movies, involves a composer who runs afoul of a Phil Spector-like pop svengali (played by the mutant music and TV celebrity Paul Williams, who also wrote the score) and, after being robbed of his face and voice, returns to haunt the mogul's palace as a masked ghoul. De Palma uses this pretzel of a narrative as an excuse for an explosion of visual flash, with the kind of humor usually found only in classic MAD comics.

PERFORMANCE (1970)



This film, which marked the joint directorial debuts of Donald Cammell (who also wrote the script) and Nicolas Roeg (who did the cinematography), was originally finished in 1968 but so badly freaked out the studio, Warner Bros., that they sat on it for two years before exposing it to the light of day, probably in the hopes that it would have the same effect on it as Dracula. James Fox plays a gangster who is forced to take it on the lam and ends up bunking in a big house with Mick Jagger as a burned-out rock star and his playmates, played by Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton. The movie had no end of trouble just getting made so that it could horrify the studio brass. It was part of the deal to get it made that it include a new Jagger/Richards composition to be performed by Jagger, but rumor has it that Jagger and Pallenberg got carried away during their love scenes and actually got down on the set, despite the fact that the filming coincided with Pallenberg's time as Richards' inamorata, with the result that Richards became sulky and was in no mood to do his usual collaborative songwriting work with his lead singer. Ry Cooder was reportedly pressed into service to help Jagger pound out "Memo from Turner", which he performs in a fantasy sequence that's the high point of the film -- an electrifying moment made all the more fascinating by the fact that for most of the film, Jaggger is a cipher with next to no screen presence. (As for Fox, he did his part for the movie's mystique by converting to evangelical Christianity and retiring from acting for a decade, inspiring rumors that the decadence of the experience had broken him like a dry twig in a hurricane. Brutal, unsettling, eye-popping and impenetrable, the movie remains one of the few true '60s head trips, like the movie version of the greatest acid-rock album covers you've ever seen.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent